Wikis for Free-form Collaboration

A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content or files. It also allows for linking among any number of pages, and this ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for Free-form Collaboration.

I have the last week been playing with different wikis and below are some thoughts;

EditMe is a very easy to use wiki. It has an in-browser WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows simple editing of every page. It's a lot like using a familiar Word Processing application with editing features, and it allows you to publish and edit text or upload files with version control, but also add comments below the text or uploaded files.

MediaWiki is a wiki preferred by some of our more technical members. It is not that easy to use as EditMe, but it does not take you long to learn how to publish and edit text or upload files. MediaWiki has by default a start page followed by a discussion page for each topic, and you can also create watch lists to monitor changes. It is very flexible and easy to navigate, and this is the wiki software used by Wikipedia.

SocialText is another leading wiki for organizations. All users have their own dashboard with access to new and existing information in the wiki. It has a WYSIWYG editor with version control and allows you to email pages in and out of the wiki. It also allows you to only see changes in the wiki.

What is your preferred wiki? Please let me know the pros and cons.

Comments

[Jesse Wilkins]

I use pbwiki at present (http://www.pbwiki.com). It's pretty easy to use and premium users have access to things like custom templates using CSS, output to PDF, email notification of changes, etc.

Socialtext has a number of interesting wikis out there, and I am looking much more at some of their advanced capabilities.

For a pretty good list of wiki software, see Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software, or WikiMatrix (http://www.wikimatrix.org/).

[Gordon]

Hi Atle,

For our TOWER Software SDK Developers wiki (http://towersoft.com/sdk), we settled on DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) - it uses a very similar syntax to mediawiki, but it doesn't require any relational DB - just a series of flat files. This means it's easier for us to generate pages, and to customize and port it around from place to place. We've been really happy with it so far. :)

[Ulrich Leutbecher]

I am using collaborative software for my project communication. Wiki is one major application. MediaWiki syntax is a good choice because it is known to many users and seems to become a de-facto standard.

I like the integrated approach of my java-based platform. See also: http://ilm.twoday.net/stories/2549466/